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FRIDAY, Oct. 5, 2012 — Scientists in Japan have bred healthy mice with eggs they created in a lab dish.

The researchers, from Kyoto University, detail how they produced the eggs using stem cells — a first in mammals — and fertilized them with natural mouse sperm in a report published in the journal Science. The result: Healthy mice pups.

The findings fuel hopes that scientists can someday apply similar steps to create human eggs that could be fertilized in the same way and produce babies. It would be a huge leap for men and women facing fertility problems.

"Wow. That's my general reaction," Hank Greely, PhD, a bioethicist at Stanford University told NPR. "Repairing hearts, repairing brains, repairing kidneys, that's all good and important, and we'd all love to be able to do that. But this involves making the next generation."

The scientists in Japan created the mouse eggs using two types of stem cells: embryonic stem cells (retrieved from embryos) and induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, which are adult cells retrievable from skin cells or blood cells. Scientists can reprogram those cells to resemble embryonic stem cells.

With much controversy surrounding the ethics of using embryonic stem cells, proof that scientists can breed healthy offspring with eggs created from adult stem cells, is particularly interesting — even if it's only been proven in mice so far.

The next step for the study's authors is to try creating eggs and sperm from primate cells, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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